# HERBS

> A GitOps deployment framework (ArgoCD, CUE, Helm) giving 12 product teams one way to ship to any cell. ~500 rollouts, zero production outages on platform-owned systems.

2025–2026 · Senior Principal Architect, Palo Alto Networks · tags: gitops, argocd, cue, helm, kubernetes

Source: https://brandonbjelland.com/projects/herbs/

## The problem

Twelve product teams were each solving deployment orchestration on their own: placement across
clusters, ordering, versioning, and compliance configuration. It was hard on three fronts:

- **Engineering:** multi-cluster rollouts with strict ordering across different compliance regimes
  are unforgiving. One bad rollout has a portfolio-wide blast radius.
- **Business:** twelve teams reinventing the same glue meant months of duplicated, inconsistent work.
- **People:** the hardest part. Teams rarely give up control of their own deployment path willingly,
  so converging on one framework was as much an influence problem as an architecture one.

## The approach

HERBS lets a team describe its application as a **bundle**, and the platform handles placement,
ordering, and versioning. It’s built on ArgoCD, CUE, and Helm with a two-layer GitOps model, and
includes pre-deployment impact analysis (`herbs-diff`) so every change shows its blast radius before
it ships.

I owned the architecture and the load-bearing decisions, and deliberately had a teammate write most of
the initial implementation under my guidance to grow him into an owner. It worked: teammates now write
their own architecture decision records for HERBS and author the majority of its commits.

The next step is agentic: a conversational API over HERBS resources, so operating the platform becomes
a matter of asking rather than hand-editing YAML.

## Outcome

- 12 teams deploy through HERBS today.
- ~500 version rollouts since launch, peaking at 91 in a single month.
- Zero production outages on platform-owned systems since launch.
- A reusable core that replaces the bespoke deployment glue each team would otherwise maintain.